On the Emergence of Routines: An Interactional Micro-history of Rehearsing a Scene

Abstract

In workplace settings, skilled participants cooperate on the basis of shared routines in smooth and often implicit ways. Our study shows how interactional histories provide the basis for routine coordination. We draw on theater rehearsals as a perspicuous setting for tracking interactional histories. In theater rehearsals, the process of building performing routines is in focus. Our study builds on collections of consecutive performances of the same instructional task coming from a corpus of video-recordings of 30 h of theater rehearsals of professional actors in German. Over time, instructions and their implementations are routinely coordinated by virtue of accumulated shared interactional experience: Instructions become shorter, the timing of responses becomes increasingly compacted and long negotiations are reduced to a two-part sequence of instruction and implementation. Overall, a routine of how to perform the scene emerges. Over interactional histories, patterns of projection of next actions emanating from instructions become reliable and can be used by respondents as sources for anticipating and performing relevant next actions. The study contributes to our understanding of how shared knowledge and routines accumulate over shared interactional experiences in publicly performed and reciprocally perceived ways and how this impinges on the efficiency of joint action.

Lifewide Learning in Postdigital Societies

“…The analysis of her learning journal entries helps us understand why: She suddenly became aware of interactional practices that are usually taken for granted in everyday conversations, a process of self-awareness and self-reflection connected to interculturality (Bennett, 2012). At the end of the game, both her journal entry and her interactional practices show how comfortable she is with the interactional routines (Schmidt and Deppermann, 2023) of the group.…”

Overcoming Blanking: Verbal and Visual Features of Prompting in Theatre Rehearsals

“…Regarding the knowledge acquired in the course of the rehearsals, excerpts 2 and 3 demonstrate a process of mutual adaptation of the participants. Since Schmidt and Deppermann (2023a) show that "routine coordination of actions is an effect of the accumulation of shared knowledge over joint interactional histories," it is quite conceivable that prompting is more likely to fail in chronologically earlier cases.…”

The emergence of social order in everyday interacting: re-conceptualizing a venerable sociological concept in light of conversation analysis

“…But because the properties of the macro-level social order that emerge in recurrent interacting are conjointly co-constituted across both time and space, it is likely that research methods in addition to CA will be necessary in exploring and grounding the re-conceptualization. Recent research in what has become known as longitudinal CA has begun to reveal how social practices and meanings emerge and come into use as groups of individuals interact over time in extended families ( Beach, 2009 ) and in theatre ensembles ( Deppermann and Schmidt, 2021 ; Schmidt and Deppermann, 2023 ). Deppermann and Streeck’s (2018) , Pekarek Doehler and Deppermann’s (2021) , and Pekarek Doehler et al’s (2018) edited collections include a wide range of longitudinal studies employing CA.…”